I never could wink well. It always feels like pink eye. The insincerity of it makes my face go all loopy. This learning disability has undoubtedly kept me out of some trouble, but not enough.

Some pretty slick winksters have crossed my path. They all promised more than they intended to deliver. Most of their winking had to do with money or sex. I think most Wall Street winksters end up in Boca Raton (they’re attracted to the fellowship of alligators) or prison. They’re good at finding out what you want and making sure you never get it. You probably first encountered them in kindergarten. For some of us it was earlier than that.

When they start calling you buddy or babe it’s time to slip out the back, Jack. Winksters are always your new best friend. They make you forget you must have looked like you needed one. They’re the folks who looked like top dogs, even in the playpen. You know the kind. We’re always throwing them in over their heads because we want to be them. Now they’re running the country.

Women winksters usually strike me as more conflicted. They think it’s fine for you to get what you want. From somebody else. And they usually wish you well, or at least not ill.

I only wanted to wink by way of saying, I like you. But my face just seized up, like an engine that lost its oil. I was fourteen or fifteen when I first realized my face didn’t work. It was on the Lexington Avenue subway—always a good place to find out how handicapped you are. This beautiful young woman was reading The Herald Tribune (now an artifact of Republican sanity) and she had folded it in handy quarters the way real subway riders do. I didn’t want to be caught dead thinking how lovely she looked. I was convinced all members of the extrasensory other sex could read my mind and would hate it. And then what? Perilous question. This particular young woman lowered the upper lefthand quadrant of Helen Rogers Reid’s mind, smiled and winked. Right smack dab in my worried adolescent face.

I have been grateful to her all my life. Her generosity shines through the years, for I’ve known all too many young women to feign indignation at such admiration and revel in my discomfort. I’ve prayed many times that that young woman enjoyed a long and happy life.

Once I had eyebrow ambitions. My left brow makes a nice caret, but my eyeball gets stuck up there, making me look more goofy than skeptical. I can cross my eyes pretty well, but that just reaffirms people’s first impression.

When I was a reporter I thought it would help to be walleyed. While people are following your glance up a wall you stab them with your next question. But such gimmicks don’t do reporters much good unless they can keep their mouths shut. If they can’t, they become pundits.

People think you’re a swell guy when you wink. But who needs such people? They vote for morons and take payola from developers. Now developers, they wink a lot. And talk fast. Once you’ve got your hand in their pockets they stop winking.

I had a dog that winked, and she didn’t have anything to develop. I used to try to wink back at Cookie, but it always made her snort. She’s pretty high on the list of mentors I miss.

Do you have a secret name for yourself? I’ve had quite a few, but the one that sticks is Henry Hogwash. Henry and I have been through a lot. He showed up midway in my life when I saw that taking myself too seriously was at least as bad as a fifth of Scotch a day. Another Henry accompanied the poet John Berryman through his Dream Songs. He was a bit more morose than Hogwash and didn’t serve the poet as well as the poet served him.

When I was a kid my name seemed to anesthetize people’s tongues. It was a different America then. People with perfectly beautiful names were still anglicizing their names. You know that schtick, right? The way the good old boys in Washington still try to anglicize our body politic? Some members of my maternal family never even learned to spell it. Juh-loo was the best they could do. Just for the record, it actually sounds something like Jeh-lool. I was called Jello and Jules and a few other things that make me wince.

The consequence of all this, beside enjoying teachers at the start of a new class staring bug-eyed at my name, was that I began expecting someone else to show up in the mirror. Someone with a reputable Sunday school name, the kind of kid who didn’t make anybody blink. Over time I became pretty well convinced that the kid in the mirror wasn’t me. He was a tourist who’d go away some day. Maybe even somebody I wished would go away.

Henry brought some good news with him. All that angst, he said, is
hogwash. You’re not a bad guy. If you don’t look like your mother’s family, Henry opined, well, that’s their loss. Listen Hogwash, I said, they look, you know, regular, normal, acceptable. They look American. Oh, like Mohawks you mean? Henry said. Well, no, like… Yeah, yeah, I get it, said Henry, and it’s a dumb idea. I want you to get over yourself, he said.

Henry has always refused to appear in my mirror. That used to worry me. If you’re not going to show yourself, I’m not going to listen to you, I announced. Like I care, he said. I believe what I see, I shouted. Oh yeah, sure you do, that’s why you’re as crazy as hell in the middle of your life, he said. Your problem is you don’t believe what you see, he offered. You don’t get it, he said, warming to his subject, you don’t believe that what you see is what you get, because if you did you would’ve cut that kid some slack. That kid? You mean Jello? Juh-loo?

That’s when I coined another name for myself. Harrison Horseshit. Harrison is the suit I take out of the closet to argue with Henry when I know Henry is right. I hear the two of them in the middle of the night banging around the house wondering whether the guy in bed upstairs is worth all their trouble. Harrison never wins, but I enjoy the hell out of him when I’m being perverse, when I catch a small glimpse of what a horse’s ass I’ve been.

Hogwash is the man of the hour. I toast him when something good happens, or at least when nothing bad happens. If I write a good poem, Hogwash takes the credit. He deserves it. Without him the poem would be screechingly grandiose. Hogwash has a very clear idea of what I don’t know and he’s constantly on guard lest I put on airs. When I put on airs as a writer I sound like an Edwardian prig. I don’t know why I don’t sound Victorian. My best guess is that the boarding school where I grew up out in West Islip, Long Island, was run by an Edwardian couple. They were British, so I knew my Walter Scott and Thomas Hardy long before I heard of those colonials Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne. My first reaction to Walt Whitman was that he should have dialed it down and was disquietingly full of himself.

The first inkling I had that we master each other’s names, no matter how difficult they may be, out of respect for each other, came when a Navy captain at the end of my boot camp training called out my name perfectly. Jeh-lool Marbrook, he said. I was so amazed a buddy had to nudge me out of the ranks. He was presenting me with an award for being company honor man, which meant that 115 of my peers had liked me, even if I was from Noo Yawk. Not only did this grand captain say my name right, but Navymen kept on saying it right. I’ll be damned, I thought. I liked it better than a promotion. In fact, it was a promotion.

But the name that had been quite good enough for the U. S. Navy did not pass muster at my first newspaper. So I became Del, only to find out that there would be just as many people mispronouncing Del as there had been mispronouncing Djelloul. Dale, they said. Mel. Delbert. Delmar. Once at church there was a nice guy named Phil who just couldn’t remember Del. So I started calling him Bill. After a while he stopped calling me anything. I was content and it relieved him of a seeming burden.

Given half a chance, there will always be people who have trouble with your name, even if it’s Sue. My advice is don’t trouble to correct the situation. If they thought they could get a half million from you they’d sure as hell say your name right. It’s not about the name, it’s about who we decide to respect. That’s why I remember that Navy captain. He said to himself, I don’t know who this kid is, but I’m gonna find out how to say his name because he’s one of us. So when they have trouble with your name, you’re not one of them. And you don’t want to be.

The writer Andrew Sullivan recently crowed about the failure of
Mary Cheney’s Now It’s My Turn to sell more than 4,091 copies since the start of the year. The vice president’s daughter (seen left) hasn’t endeared herself to evangelicals by denigrating their jihad to make gay marriage unconstitutional. What’s so pathetic about this is that it so perfectly comments on a society that reduces creative effort to a horse race.

Sullivan was able to use Nielsen’s Book Scan to rub Ms. Cheney’s face in her sales figures, as if sales figures tell us anything about a book’s merits or demerits. He figured that since she reportedly got a $1 million advance she ought to be red-faced about her modest sales. He ought to be red-faced about his meanness.

Book Scan has been around since 2001. It captures about 70 percent of sales for a hardcover book. It’s used by agents, editors and marketers, and it’s pricey. When it’s used by journalists to humiliate writers it becomes an instrument of persecution, and journalists who use it this way are pigs.

You could argue that since Mary Cheney is her father’s most trusted political aide Sullivan had every right as a journalist to use Book Scan this way. After all, she wasn’t trying to write the great American novel. I don’t mind this argument. But whichever way you argue, the incident points up the squalor of a society that measures creativity by sales.

How many times have you seen a critic ask if a writer can top his current book? The idea is so ridiculous it hardly bears discussion, but that doesn’t stop many critics.

I haven’t read Ms. Cheney’s book, and I don’t intend to. I don’t like her politics or her father’s, although I agree with her that gay marriage is hardly a constitutional crisis, except for people who think people who think for themselves are enemies of the state. But to take any measure of glee in her book’s modest sales strikes me as every bit as mean as her father’s politics.

When we measure everything by its earning power we demean everything and everyone. That’s why I’ve argued for a long time that best-seller lists belong on business pages, but they’ll never be posted there because the media persist in trying to befuddle us into believing such lists are a measure of a book’s merits rather than the amount of marketing clout put into it.

The list of what I can imagine a world without is long. I can imagine a world without oil, without me, and even without gender. But poetry is indispensable. Without it we can’t plumb our own understanding of anything: what is locked within us would kill us.

I think we progress towards androgyny because of an irresistible impulse to be whole. Poetry is the catalyst of this impulse.

There’s too much talk of rights and separations, tribal and ideological campfires, and not enough of the rite of passage which poetry celebrates, the passage of the human race to a consciousness from which it can look back and see its long wallow in right and wrong, in taking offense, as its adolescence.

A man who leaves a line of poetry behind or an appreciation of poetry in someone else leaves more than Bill Gates or Warren Buffett can amass in a hundred lifetimes, because to poetry we attribute a world capable of appreciating such a notion.

I think our footfall in this life is cloddish because self-importance is made of lead. The job of alchemy is not to transmute this lead to gold but to distill the self from importance.

When I think of the world without me—an exercise I commend to anyone sick with an illusion of power—I think of poetry. It will be there, surviving this place where it still matters who wrote it.

When I was a book review editor for The Winston-Salem (NC) Journal & Sentinel back in the late 1960s I occasionally got a review that showed telltale signs of having been cobbled together from the book jacket and publisher’s press kit. I don’t remember reporters ever doing that, but a few academics did. It was a bummer because I not only had to junk the review, I had to cook up an excuse for not using it so as not to ruffle the feathers of a cheat. Then, if I really wanted the book reviewed, I had to find an honest reader.

I had usually read a review or two before my own contributor weighed in. The job sometimes woke me up in the middle of the night because I hated to pan books. I especially hated savage or snide reviews that did a better job describing the reviewer’s adolescence than the book’s supposed demerits. My greatest pleasure in that job was a reviewer finding some unique aspect of a book that even its publicists missed. I guess my biggest failing in that job was that, with limited space, I reviewed entirely too much poetry.

Having had this experience, I was thrilled this week when The Midwest Book Review reviewed my novel, Saraceno. The reviewer celebrated Hettie Warshaw, the aged magus who had been Josef Mengele’s slave-assistant at Auschwitz. Much of the book’s wisdom, such as it is, resides in Hettie, in what she made of her horrific life, and I was gratified that the reviewer had savored this. If Saraceno is ever filmed Hettie will have to be played by someone like the mature Joan Plowright or Olympia Dukakis, someone who understands that even horror is good for a laugh.

Back in Winston-Salem I never envisioned that a book of my own would ever be reviewed. I had many failings, but I knew I had nothing to say. I would have rather walked the plank than have a book of mine reviewed, especially considering how snarky many reviewers are. I tried to keep the snarks at bay. I considered them worse than the horse’s asses who waste twenty-one precious inches to tell you how bad is a movie that ought to have been ignored in the first place. Sounds familiar, right?

Some folks are doing a lot of clucking and tsk-tsking about the inevitable decline of the language due to the anarchy of the Internet. They obviously haven’t been sloshing through some of the crapola coming out of the Big Six publishing houses with all their vaunted resources and tastemaking apparatchiks. I see a lot of clunk and bunk on the Web, to be sure, but I’ve been seeing it on the printed page all my life. The spectacle of big-shot publishers complaining about the absence of gatekeeping in cyberspace is not particularly compelling in view of their own performance. But a market society has to savor hypocrisy in a vast array of disguises.

I’m happy to share The Midwest Review’s review of Saraceno with you, and I’ve enrolled them among my growing list of hyper-linked friends over to your right on this blogroll.

Djelloul Marbrook’s quasi-autobiographical novel Saraceno is the story of Billy Salviati, a young and attractive hit-man for the mob who possesses a notable gift for friendship. A fascinating read, Saraceno reveals the origins of Billy’s mob nickname, Saraceno, bestowed upon him by the Mafia don, John Altobene, and which may be taken as a compliment while retaining unique connotations. Not just another run-of-the-mill Mafia novel, Saraceno is very strongly recommended as a remarkably crafted tale that will have a particular appeal for readers who appreciate the unique tale of a Mafia thug’s transformation under the influence of an elderly woman who herself was once a slave-assistant to the infamous Josef Mengele in the Auschwitz concentration camp, and survived to mentor her hit-man protege in New York.

I’m worried about the consequences of our clickable society. If everything is just a click away we might get to thinking everyone is a click away. We might all stay home and play poker. Isn’t that what our defense secretary did? He stayed home and clicked on war. Then he clicked on Iraq. Then he complained the press dealt him a bad hand.

I’ve identified some click and double-click ideas. Like trickle-down economics. You know, make the rich richer and hope for the best. Click on rich, then click on money, and then watch it flow to the untaxable Cayman Islands.

Then there’s touch-screen voting, which, thankfully, the State of New York is resisting. New York is nothing if not savvy. Touch the screen and watch the Democrats circle the drain while the exit polls show them winning.

I think the clickable society and simplemindedness go hand in glove together. Find an enemy, click on him, send poor kids to fight him, and watch everybody die. If it sounds all too familiar, it’s because Adolph Hitler tried it.

The clickable society’s dirty little secret—life would be boring without dirty little secrets, wouldn’t it?—is that the more you click the deeper in doo you get, because everything that confronts you onscreen is totally unreliable, which is how we like our politics. One click deserves another until you are hopelessly misinformed, deluded and addicted to quick fixes.

The more addicted to quick fixes we become the more boobs we elect. I think computers, as much as I love them, as much as we all love them, have conclusively proven that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing, and all the little bits together encourage us to place our lives in the hands of idiots.

If you want to know just how clickable our society is just type clickable into Google and here’s what you get: Results 1 - 10 of about 34,300,000 for clickable. There’s a clickable mummy. You click on his sarcophagus and find out what each body part looked like. I didn’t go too deeply into that one. I even found a clickable croc, without the k. It reminded me that I myself am a clickable crock. Maybe even a doubly clickable crock. I don’t respond well to control clicks. There are clickable maps, clickable mathematics, and more than enough shaky information to guarantee you membership in the booboisie.

But the first time I saw friends using Cliff Notes I realized that society is pretty much divvied up between those who want to know dangerously little and those of us who keep discovering how ignorant we are. I’m pretty sure I’m going to die ignorant, but I still aspire to die an adult. I think the first group is chronically elected to high office by its peers. The latter group has its hands full trying to stay sane.

—DM

If I told you I can tell a lot about a man by the way he ties his tie, you might be tempted to say: a) that’s why ties are going out of fashion, or b) the Malarkey Quotient is pretty high among bloggers.

Actually I think the MQ is pretty high in public life. The media enjoy a towering lack of esteem, but it hasn’t dawned on their owners that this precipitous decline of respect corresponds to the rise of infotainment, which is their formula for operating on the cheap.

About those ties, I notice that CNN’s Lou Dobbs, America’s favorite fulminator, doesn’t indent his ties as they pour out of their knot, while Sen. John McCain prefers the dimpled tie. Does this mean Mr. Dobbs is reliably upfront while shadows lurk in the senator’s persona? Or does it mean the Arizonan is a tad more stylish than the journalist?

I think this entire kerfuffle started with a bartender named Malarkey who delighted in plopping Red Dye Number Two cherries in Martinis. Such a sot is liable to say anything, and you can be sure it will be carried out of his bar as absolute truth. I mean, if you want to be taken seriously you have to come up with some serious content, right? Ahem, media muckymucks, you listening?

Malarkey plays an important role in American life and it ought to be celebrated at least as much as random violence, simplemindedness and good Nielsen ratings. If it can be used to grease the skids to the White House or to Iraq, then I think we should handle it like baseball stats. We know Randy Johnson’s ERA, so why shouldn’t we track Dubya’s MQ? He’s at least as good as the Big Unit at pitching it. We should figure out how to quantify it. If baseball is the sport of stats, shouldn’t politics be the sport of people who enjoy a good laugh?

Back to those ties for a moment. You didn’t think I had anything as important to say as your average talking head, did you? I will say, though, that some of my ties just naturally dimple and some don’t, which maybe is to say you have to find the wont of things in life. A carpenter can tell you that (in fact, one did tell us that), but don’t expect world leaders to listen to a carpenter. If they did, would there be wars? People have their wont too. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to tie people the wrong way, and I’m deeply ashamed of that.

We don’t know the origin of the word malarkey, but of course we can’t help noting it sounds vaguely Celtic. It has a big clan of boisterous cousins: balderdash, blather, bunkum, claptrap, drivel, piffle, poppycock, rigmarole, twaddle and tomfoolery, among others. I’ve lived next door to quite a few of them and I’ve spent a lot of time in bars and political rallies listening to them.

Now kerfuffle is another matter entirely. We know just where it comes from: the Scots word caerr, meaning wrong, and fuffle, meaning to become disheveled. Sounds like a political campaign to me. You know, where the truth gets fuffled. But I could be caerr.